Perfect Easy White Bread

Nothing can beat an impressive loaf of crusty, rustic bread coming out of a home oven. Won’t you agree? I love homemade breads. Bread baking is one of my favorite kitchen activities, if not the most favorite. Remember the story of my bakery owner grandfather? His passion for bread must have passed on to me. I always try to squeeze making bread into my hectic schedule and I bake bread at least twice a week. It is tandoori bread when we crave the traditional, no-knead bread when I am lazy, and as of recently, perfect easy white bread, when I want to feel like an artisan baker.

What makes this white bread perfect and why easy? The perfection is in the beautiful crusty, golden top and light and porous interior. And easy because it is so easy to achieve this! When you know how.

The trick is in the kneading! Most bread recipes will tell you to briefly knead the dough and leave aside to rise after you’ve combined the ingredients together.

This particular recipe goes a slightly different route. The author of the original recipe, Dan Lepard, instructs kneading the dough with oil a few times at 10-minute intervals before leaving the dough to rise. It is amazing how the somewhat sticky dough becomes smooth and elastic as you knead it with oil. And the bread that comes out of the oven is the absolute perfection. Just look at this picture below. Irresistible. No?

I hope you give this recipe a try. You will be so proud of yourself. The process if perfectly simple and the bread is simply perfect. What’s not to love, right? Let’s do it.continue reading